Kant's Organicism: Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy

By Jennifer Mensch

“A striking and radical rereading of [Kant’s first Critique] through the concept of epigenesis . . . Mensch’s reading is bold and innovative.” —Radical Philosophy

The towering achievement of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason has long overshadowed his other interests in natural history and the life sciences, which were considered separate from his theoretical philosophy—until now. In Kant’s Organicism, Jennifer Mensch draws a crucial link between these spheres by showing how the concept of epigenesis—a radical theory of biological formation—lies at the heart of Kant’s conception of reason.

As Mensch argues, epigenesis was not simply a metaphor for Kant but centrally guided his critical philosophy, especially the relationship between reason and the categories of the understanding. Offsetting a study of Kant’s highly technical theory of cognition with a mixture of intellectual history and biography, Mensch situates the epigenesis of reason within broader investigations into theories of generation, genealogy, and classification, and against later writers and thinkers such as Goethe and Darwin.

Distilling vast amounts of research into a concise and accessible book, Mensch offers one of the most refreshing looks not only at Kant’s famous first Critique but at the history of philosophy and the life sciences as well.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9780226022031

Book preview

JENNIFER MENSCH teaches philosophy and the history of science and medicine at the Pennsylvania State University.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2013 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2013.

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-02198-0 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-02203-1 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mensch, Jennifer.

Kant’s organicism: epigenesis and the development of critical philosophy / Jennifer Mensch.

pages. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-02198-0 (cloth: alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-02203-1 (e-book) 1. Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804. 2. Philosophy of nature. I. Title.

B2799.N37M46 2013

193—dc23                                        2012043133

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Kant’s Organicism

Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy

JENNIFER MENSCH

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

For Zoe, whose flourishing has lived up entirely

to the promise of her name.

Systems seem to be formed in the manner of lowly organisms, through a generatio aequivoca from the mere confluence of assembled concepts, at first imperfect, and only gradually attaining to completeness, although they have one and all had their schema, as the original germ, in the sheer self-development of reason. Hence, not only is each system articulated in accordance with an idea, but they are one and all organically united in a system of human knowledge, as members of one whole, and so as admitting of an architectonic of all human knowledge.

CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON, A835/B863

Contents

Preface

Introduction: Kant’s Organicism

1. Generation and the Task of Classification

Mechanism and the Principle of Life

Leibniz’s Organic Machines

2. Buffon’s Natural History and the Founding of Organicism

Hales and the Physiology of Plants

Buffon the French Newtonian

Maupertuis, Buffon, and the Problem of Form

Natural History and the History of Nature

3. Kant and the Problem of Origin

Kant’s Eclecticism

Matter and Cosmos

The Spectacle of Life

4. The Rebirth of Metaphysics

A Philosophy Is Born

From Original Acquisition to the Epigenesis of Knowledge

Concepts and Objects: Kant’s Letter to Herz, 1772

5. From the Unity of Reason to the Unity of Race

The Unity of Reason

The Unity of Race

A Germ of Reason and a Germ for Race

6. Empirical Psychology in Tetens and Kant

Epigenesis and Evolution in Tetens’s Philosophical Essays

From Empirical Psychology to a Transcendental Theory of Imagination

Transcendental Philosophy and the Physiology of Pure Reason

7. Kant’s Architectonic: System and Organism in the Critique of Pure Reason

The Doctrine of Method: The Bauplan of the System

The Transcendental Deduction: The Bauplan at Work

Organic Logic: A Cautionary Tale

Epilogue: A Daring Adventure of Reason

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

Immanuel Kant has maintained an enduring intellectual presence through his works on morality, reason, history, and art. He created the first university courses on physical geography and anthropology, and throughout his career he taught logic and metaphysics alongside courses discussing everything from taste to table etiquette. It is estimated that by the time Kant died there were already well over three thousand published pieces devoted to his work, and even as Kant’s general influence waned toward the end of the nineteenth century, new currents emerged such that Neo-Kantianism came to describe a number of schools in philosophy. Kant’s moral theory remains to this day a pillar of classical ethics and a centerpiece in contemporary bioethical discussions of autonomy and patients’ rights, and he continues to hold interdisciplinary appeal across various fields of law, science, and the humanities. In recent times, Kant has attracted added attention from historians of science and critical race theorists for his work in natural history and, as some have it, for his invention of the concept of race. It is such long-standing and widespread interest in Kant’s work, interest stemming from all manner of intellectual backgrounds and any number of investigatory goals, that has made Kant one of the most widely discussed authors in the history of ideas.

Given the very breadth of Kant scholarship, it is perhaps useful to locate this book, at least in a topographical vein, within its appropriate region. Kant’s Organicism starts by tracing the history of the life sciences as Kant would have come to know them, focusing especially on those philosophers and life scientists whose works directly engaged Kant during his intellectually formative years. Once Kant’s connection to the life sciences has been established, the remainder of this book moves to an examination of the exact nature of the influence of these sciences on the emerging critical system. When viewed from the perspective of the life sciences in this manner, Kant’s theoretical philosophy becomes reframed as a philosophical project whose development was deeply influenced by the rise of organicism, a movement that arose in the wake of developments in natural history and helped shape fields as diverse as science, literature, politics, and philosophy. The general argument for Kant’s organicism is outlined in the introduction, with the details left to be developed in the chapters that follow.

There are a great many people to thank when one writes a book, and I am glad for the opportunity here to express my gratitude for all of the help and support I received along the way. Tracking down obscure historical references is a time-consuming endeavor, and I was fortunate throughout to have had the tireless help of Claudia Villafranca from Pennsylvania State University’s Interlibrary Loan division. Special thanks go to Mary Terrall for not only generously sharing her private notes on Maupertuis’s Baumann thesis but also pointing me toward Berlin as a resource for this manuscript in the first place. Peggy Price, curator of Special Collections at the University of Southern Mississippi, patiently went through volumes of the German edition of Buffon’s Histoire naturelle in search of references for me. Eric Watkins gave special help with translation questions related to Kant’s scientific works dating from his earliest precritical writings; Holly Wilson was intrepid in resolving a number of problems, dating and otherwise, regarding Kant’s anthropological essays and lectures; and Robert J. Richards provided both feedback and guidance concerning the relationship between Blumenbach and Kant. Three of my colleagues in the Department of Philosophy are to be especially thanked for their continuous support and encouragement regarding the project, Robert Bernasconi, Brady Bowman, and Mark Fisher. My thanks also to Peter Giannopoulos, who lent his talent and energy to the book in its final stages by preparing the bibliography.

When I began this book, I had already been lecturing on Kant for a good number of years, and it is a pleasure to express my appreciation here for the Kant scholars whose teaching and work first inspired me as their student and whose influence has continued to affect me as a professor and scholar. For this I want to thank Rudolf Makkreel, Eckart Förster, Manfred Kuehn, Hoke Robinson, and Mark Timmons. Kant’s Organicism also benefited from the readers’ comments made by John Zammito and Günter Zöller; I am grateful for the time and energy they put into their reviews, and I hope they will feel that the book has been improved as a result. At the University of Chicago Press David Brent has been ideal as both an editor and overall supporter of the project; his editorial associate, Priya Nelson, has been in equal measure efficient, friendly, and helpful in steering the book through all its various stages from review to production. Finally, I am especially grateful for George Roupe’s careful work and thoughtful suggestions when copyediting the final manuscript for Chicago.

I received a great deal of support while writing this book from my family, including, of course, my dog Ollie, who stayed by my side during every minute that I worked on it. My mother and father, Josephine and James Mensch, and my brother and sister, Joshua and Jessica Mensch, have been as good as it gets for unconditional support, encouragement, and general partisanship on my behalf during the entire process from beginning to end. My daughter, Zoe Mensch Schmidt, has been both patient beyond her years and full of good suggestions for wrapping up the project a bit more speedily than it has been, reminding me with some significance on more than one occasion that staples have always worked well for her when putting the finishing touches on one of her own books. My greatest thanks of all go to my husband, Dennis J. Schmidt, who not only read through and edited the manuscript three times from beginning to end but kept the house and everything in it, not least including me, sane, organized, and happy; for that and more, Denny, thank you.

A portion of chapter 1 appeared previously in slightly different form as Understanding Affinity: Locke on Generation and the Task of Classification, Locke Studies 11 (2011): 49–71. The image used in the conclusion is a reproduction of the title page of Francis Bacon’s Instauratio Magna, held by the Rare Books Collection at the University of Chicago Library; my thanks to the staff at the Special Collections Research Center for their help in procuring the image and granting permission for its use.

INTRODUCTION

Kant’s Organicism

This book is oriented by the conviction that Kant should be fitted into a framework that has begun to take shape in a number of fields when it comes to thinking about the mid- to late eighteenth century, a framework that can be called something like organic thinking or, better yet, organicism. Organicism can be defined by its view of nature as something that cannot be reduced to a set of mechanical operations. The stage for organicism was historically set by investigations into the connected concerns of natural history and embryogenesis, investigations leading to inevitable conclusions regarding nature’s vitality and power. And while historians of science have long understood the centrality of these investigations to the late eighteenth century as a whole, it is increasingly the case that disciplines outside of science are now producing studies of the period along similar lines. At this point there are numerous accounts of epigenesist poetry and epigenesist literature; there are political theorists who speak of Enlightenment vitalism, and the utopian literature of the period is said to employ the language of epigenesis when describing the ideal society. Indeed, in light of all this activity one cannot help but reach the conclusion that the latter half of the long eighteenth century is a period best defined by its organicism. For organicism, used interchangeably with epigenesis, a term borrowed from embryological theory, seems best to describe the response by science and art, in politics and literature, when grasping the problems and possibilities of an irreducibly living nature.¹

Now it has become customary for literary critics and historians alike to pay passing tribute to Kant’s role in this narrative, a tribute paid almost without exception to Kant’s third Critique, the Critique of Judgment, a book devoted to an investigation of nature and art. Kant’s language of reflective judgment and his appeal to transcendental principles as heuristic guides for orientation were modes of epistemic caution that were for the most part ignored as the possibilities for connecting teleology and mechanism and for discovering freedom within nature and art were taken up instead by Kant’s successors. There are in fact numerous points of contact between the Critique of Judgment and the Romantic science that would follow, but I want to investigate the degree to which Kant—and not just Kant as he was appropriated through the third Critique—can be located within a period defined by its organicism in order to discover in what manner Kant too would be attracted to the model offered up by epigenesis for thinking about questions of origin and generative processes in general. For it is my sense that epigenesist models had a significant role to play for Kant’s theory of cognition, for what one might even go so far as to describe as his epigenesist philosophy of mind. And I believe that it is in fact only through attention to this influence, to seeing Kant’s organicism as it were, that we can both make sense of the transcendental deduction at the heart of Kant’s theory of cognition and discover the means by which his work in natural history can be meaningfully integrated into the critical system as a central part of the whole.

Before turning to Kant, however, it is worth pausing briefly to rehearse the general state of the life sciences as Kant would have first come to appreciate them in the 1750s and 1760s. By 1772 Thomas Ramsay could write that natural history is, at present, the favourite science over all Europe, and the progress which has been made in it will distinguish and characterize the eighteenth century in the annals of literature.² Answering the question as to why natural history would achieve the kind of popularity it would enjoy well into the nineteenth century would take us too far afield, but at least a few of the contributing points can be made so far as these set the stage for organicism. By midcentury, for example, serious challenges had been laid down against the reigning theory of generation and indeed the general portrait of organic life as a whole. For much of the century before this, those working in the life sciences could be roughly divided into experimenters and systematists. This division is important to notice, since it is precisely the convergence of what had been parallel tracks, of experimentation with organic processes on the one hand and of the systematic classification of individual organisms on the other, that both established natural history as something that Ramsay would have recognized and became a basis for challenging the received view.

Until the 1740s, theories of generation, and of embryogenesis in particular, were oriented by a belief in the preexistence of all biological organisms. The position sounds fantastic today, but at the time, there were good reasons for its central role in biological theory. The notion that God had created every individual at the beginning of history relieved naturalists of the need to explain the means by which organisms might manage the imposition of form and force on an otherwise lifeless matter; that material being was indeed lifeless apart from God’s agency had firm support from post-Reformationist schools of thought. Preexistence made room, moreover, for the increasingly secluded mechanical philosophy when it came to the explanation of organic generation. No one had been convinced by the Cartesian analysis of generation as a form of fermentation, and thus there was almost a sense of relief when mechanism assumed once more an important role to play for explaining the processes of nutrition and growth in the expansion of the previously formed yet submicroscopic individual. It was in fact the microscope that, more than anything else, lent credibility to the theory once experimenters discovered what they took to be miniature homunculi encapsulated in the spermatic worms seen by Leeuwenhoek in the late 1670s. Finally, it was a matter of particular convenience for the systematists to endorse preexistence so far as it ensured that for all the difficulties facing taxonomy the objects of that science would remain stable. As Linnaeus suggested, it might be tricky to determine whether the mulberry belonged with the nettles, but at least one could be sure that mulberries as a species were fixed.

The tide began to turn against preexistence theories in the 1740s, starting with Abraham Trembley’s spectacular discovery of the freshwater hydra. This polyp appeared to be infinitely plastic with respect to its possibilities for regeneration. It could be sliced, severed, turned entirely inside out: in every case the hydra either regenerated the lost part, generated a second individual, or, in the last instance, simply grew a new outside altogether. The impact of this discovery cannot be overestimated for its revolutionizing effect on the life sciences. Questions poured out as a consequence of this discovery: How could preexistence theory explain this capacity? How, in this instance, could one insist on the lifelessness of the animal-machine? It hardly helped matters to note the problem of categorizing the polyp altogether, so far as it seemed to be essentially a plant with a stomach. Problems in classification had in fact begun to multiply as botanists in particular complained of the difficulty in fitting their observations to Linnaeus’s system, and categories assigned to indeterminate species thus slowly began to overshadow the so-called pure lines. In the late 1740s, Pierre Louis Maupertuis, the newly elected president of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, began to collect records that he would publish on a family known for its many cases of polydactylity. If, as those records indicated, a trait could be passed on by both female and male members of the family, the basic tenets of preexistence theory had to be wrong: generation must be an active process, one clearly requiring the contribution of both mother and father in the production of an embryo. Against this kind of evidence, it almost seemed beside the point to wonder what God would have had in mind when preforming deformities such as those experienced by the family of polydactyls.

Hybrids, hydras, monsters: these were all certainly on Georges Buffon’s mind as he sat down to begin composing what would eventually grow to be some three dozen volumes on natural history. The first three volumes, appearing together in 1749, were almost immediately translated into German, and Buffon’s significance in laying the groundwork for the organic view and the German strain of organicism in particular is clear. Buffon had correctly assessed the central problem facing the taxonomical system as one based on a fundamentally inaccurate view of both nature and knowledge. Nature was not rigidly demarcated along the lines proposed by the taxonomists, nor should one ever hope to completely grasp its manifold principles and operating causes when assessing its effects; at best, according to Buffon, one could adopt the strategy of a kind of game theory, using probabilities as a guide when determining the contours of our species maps. Buffon understood the consequences of his position. If research into organic processes revealed natural agency, then natural history would have to redefine itself as a discipline devoted to the histories of living things; it would need to commit itself, in other words, to the principle that nature was susceptible to change. And the first site of this capacity for change was embryogenesis. Devoting almost the entirety of volume 2 to the problem of generation, Buffon made development the basic biological process, the key to understanding natural history as a science of living nature. For it was here, during the composition of the embryo, that change could be affected by environmental factors such as food and climate. Change produced variation, or degeneration in Buffon’s terms, and it both explained the experience of affinities when viewing varieties and grounded a historical sequence capable of linking, to use one of Buffon’s favorite examples, the proud mouflon on the mountaintop and the pathetic sheep in the field. It is Buffon, then, who best marks the moment of convergence necessary for the establishment of natural history: the previously parallel investigations into system and process converged in Buffon’s natural history to produce both a new view of organic life and the basis for redefining taxonomy as a form of genealogy.

When it came to describing embryogenesis, Buffon relied on something he called an internal mold; it marked Buffon’s attempt to provide a pseudomechanical explanation of the means by which form could be conveyed to the organic material of an embryo. Sometimes described as mechanical epigenesis to distinguish it from its more vitalistic conception, the term epigenesis was rapidly appropriated beyond any one theory to represent all positions counter to preexistence.³ Epigenesis was, however, an old idea. Aristotle had considered the process by which the male imparted the soul—as source of both information and animation—to material provided by the female in terms that would suggest epigenesis to his later readers.⁴ Thus in 1651 Harvey understood himself to be following Aristotle when using epigenesis to describe the progressive development of a chicken embryo from homogeneous mass to heterogeneously structured organism.⁵ Harvey refrained from speculation regarding the basis of this organizational drive, as did Caspar Wolff, who published experimental results that he took, in 1759, to be evidence of a nutritive life force, a force that he called vis essentialis.⁶ Wolff’s observations suggested a dialectical logic underlying generation, an incessant motion that, in the case of plants, explained development as a back-and-forth motion between fluidity and solids. Epigenesis thus met a need to grasp the power and vitality of nature, but without recourse to the soul or devices such as Buffon’s interior molds, it faced an impossible task with respect to the problem of form. As one critic complained, the epigenesist needs a force which has foresight, which can make a choice, which has a goal, which, against all the laws of blind combination, always and unfailingly brings about the same end.⁷ Despite this concern, epigenesis would soon become the common denominator of organicism: a model for literature and politics as much as for Romantic science itself.

Turning to Kant now, one discovers that within two years of Kant’s passing the requirements that would allow him to teach, he received special permission to offer a new course, a course that Kant called Physical Geography, which in outline carefully followed the path taken by Buffon in the first volume of his natural history. It was 1757, and Kant had already established his interest in the problem of origin. His most important works had so far been devoted to questions regarding cosmological origin, with numerous small pieces devoted to geological formation and natural processes associated with the workings of wind, fire, and earthquakes. So it comes as no surprise to learn that Kant kept abreast of debates regarding organic generation as well. On the whole, he took the prospects for any genuine advance in the life sciences to be gloomy. Physics was easily reducible to a set of mechanical causes, but, Kant asked, "Can we claim such advantages about the most insignificant plant or insect? Are we in a position to say: Give me matter and I will show you how a caterpillar can be created? Do we not get stuck at the first step due to ignorance about the true inner nature of the object and the complexity of the diversity contained in it?" (1:230).⁸ The problem of generation was simply closed off from examination, at least so far as Kant was concerned.

It stands, therefore, as a tribute to the rising prominence of debates over preformation and the epigenesist alternative that the by then well-regarded Magister Kant took the opportunity to review the options as he saw them in 1763. The problem with preformation was that it relied on an essentially supernatural explanation, and recourses to God at this juncture in the history of science were simply no longer compelling. That said, Kant thought that it would be absurd to regard the initial generation of a plant or an animal as a mechanical effect incidentally arising from the universal laws of nature (2:114). What was needed was something different, a means of avoiding the supernatural solution even if all of the mechanical accounts of generation had so far failed. Mindful of the need to provide form, Kant emended the epigenesist alternative. Is it possible, Kant asked, that "some individual members of the plant and animal kingdoms, whose origin is indeed directly divine, nonetheless possess the capacity, which we cannot understand, to actually generate [erzeugen] their own kind in accordance with a regular law of nature, and not merely to unfold [auszuwickeln] them?" (2:114).⁹ Kant’s suggestion, in other words, proposed a compromise. Form was indeed supernaturally conceived, but while this generically maintained the stability of the species lines, the work of generating individuals actively belonged to nature. And the distance epigenesis had come from Buffon’s account was clear not only from Kant’s direct dismissal of that position as an entirely arbitrary invention but from the emphasis placed on a specifically nonmechanical account of organization.¹⁰

At this point in history there were a number of ways in which the term epigenesis was used. Above all, epigenesis referred to the production, the actual generation, of something new. And it was in this sense that detractors could link the notion to older, discredited claims regarding the spontaneous generation of flies and so on. Epigenesis, so far as it was identified with a theory like Buffon’s, emphasized the fact of joint inheritance and so was associated with an account of blending. Also in play were the two earlier accounts: Harvey’s observationally based definition of epigenesis as the development of increasingly heterogeneous structures from out of an initially homogeneous mass and Aristotle’s discussion of the imparted soul.

Kant was familiar with all of these uses. In his lecture course on metaphysics he contrasted the relative advantages offered by a preformation theory compared to epigenesis for couples, so far as epigenesis would require careful consideration of what the blended progeny might be like (17:416). Kant also regularly found opportunity to criticize Aristotle’s account as fundamentally absurd given the impossibility of dividing or sharing a simple substance like the soul (17:672, 18:190, 18:429, 28:684, 23:106–107). And although he considered the possibility that biological epigenesis might offer a real alternative to mechanical models of generation (17:591), Kant worried over the difficulty of finding a principle that would be capable of explaining the stability of epigenetic development against potentially altering sources presented by the environment (18:574). Kant’s final position regarding organic embryogenesis would sound close to the position that he had first outlined in 1763. Thus in 1790 Kant would describe epigenesis as akin to a system of generic preformation according to which "the form of the species [is] preformed virtualiter in the intrinsic purposive predispositions [Anlagen] imparted to the stock (5:423), a position to be preferred so far as it minimizes appeal to the supernatural, and after the first beginning leaves everything to nature" (5:424).¹¹ Two senses of epigenesis remain: the sense of it as a type of spontaneous generation and Harvey’s technical description of development as a movement from undifferentiated unity to an interconnected whole of diversely functioning parts. It was these two models of biological epigenesis that would prove to be most influential for Kant’s metaphysical account of cognition, an influence that would in turn clarify Kant’s subsequent investigations into natural history.¹²

Starting in the mid-1760s Kant’s attention began to turn away from concerns regarding cosmological and biological origin and toward a constellation of problems surrounding the basis of knowledge and, in particular, the origin of ideas. The problems were pressing. In metaphysics and natural science alike confusion reigned, according to Kant, as the result of insufficient attention to the bases upon which claims were being made and the careless, free-flowing use of vocabularies across the sciences. It was simply wrong to take concepts borrowed from physics, concepts like attractive and repulsive forces for example, and apply them uncritically when attempting to explain something like the metaphysical connection between body and soul. And the attempt in the life sciences to establish something like Wolff’s vis essentialis as an actual principle of life or soul within matter was no different (28:275, 283). In each case a force was asserted to explain an effect that might very well be acknowledged to exist but that resisted all mechanical attempts at explanation nonetheless (2:331). Mechanical explanation, as Kant came increasingly to believe, was the only kind available with respect to determinate knowledge of nature. Thus while Kant ultimately took generic preformation to offer the most defensible response to the problem of generation, this was an endorsement with a caveat. So long as the keys to organic processes resisted mechanical reduction, they simply could not be known with the kind of certainty afforded the nonbiological sciences of mechanics and physics. Biology could not, therefore, be realized as a complete science, and all hypotheses regarding organic formation and natural history at large would have to remain heuristic at best.

This was not the case, however, for investigations into the cognitive processes underlying the generation of knowledge. Once Kant declared metaphysics to be henceforth known as a science of the extent and limits of knowledge, the first task was to examine the basis of its claims. Taking stock of his options, Kant considered the alternatives offered by Leibniz and Locke. Leibniz, no less than the preformationists, on Kant’s view, relied on a supernatural explanation when it came to the origin of ideas. Locke’s insistence on a sensible basis, however, failed to appreciate the role played by mental reflection when generating concepts that were irreducible to sense data (28:233). In contrast to either of these positions, Kant was ready by 1771 to describe his own position as epigenetic. The real principle of reason, Kant now argued, rests "on the basis of epigenesis from the use of the natural laws of reason (17:492). Only one year before, Kant had had to content himself with tracing intellectual concepts back to what he had then described as their original acquisition via attention to the lawful workings of the mind. While this had allowed Kant to avoid the alternatives of concepts that were either sensible or innate, the explanation of just what was meant by original acquisition was missing. By subsequently identifying epigenesis as the model for cognition, Kant seems, to borrow Darwin’s phrase, to have at last found a theory by which to work."¹³

When Kant began work in earnest on the series of investigations that would lead to the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, he stopped publishing entirely in the subject matter of the Critique. It is thus a matter of special significance to see that Kant’s main publications during this period were in natural history, for only these could be conceptually linked to the somewhat parallel investigations into the bases of cognition. Kant’s single appearance in print between 1770 and 1775 was the review of an Italian anatomist’s discussion of the structural similarities between humans and animals, similarities that, in the anatomist’s view, led to the conclusion that all manner of ailments resulted from humanity’s unnatural state of two-footedness (2:421–425). In his response, Kant deferred to the medical expertise of the anatomist, but suggested, nonetheless, that a fundamental difference remained so far as humans alone contained a germ of reason (ein Keim von Vernunft), which if developed (entwickelt) would destine them for society; it was a point that Kant would continue to raise against Moscati, named or not, in subsequent lectures on physical geography and anthropology. During the remainder of the decade Kant would gradually come to realize the full consequences of what it might mean to have an epigenesist conception of mind, a mind that, like the organism itself, would have to be viewed as operating according to a kind of reflexive or organic logic according to which its unity must be viewed as both cause and effect of itself.

Until the middle of the 1770s Kant took the generation of representations to be something requiring a juggling of factors directly parallel to those in play when considering organic generation. There had to be something regular, like a set of rules, guaranteeing uniformity of production. There had to be material content, and there had to be some kind of force, something capable of putting the parts together according to the rules. Finally, there had to be something capable of maintaining the unity, if not the identity, of the whole—a simple enough set of requirements perhaps, but the work, as usual, lay in the details. The immediate challenge concerned the specific connections between the various mental faculties in play—the faculty of understanding as